FF49: The Sun was High (So was I)
by OyHumbug
Summary: When Felicity wakes up disconnected from her location, her life, and herself, somehow seeing and knowing things that neither fit with what she knew beforehand nor make sense, a simple high or allergic reaction do not explain her confusion. But a psychic connection? Pshw! That's crazy, crazy talk.


**FF#49: The Sun was High (So was I)  
An Olicity Flash Fiction One Shot**

 **FF#49: Despite The Blindfold, She Knew Exactly Where She Was**

Felicity Smoak, MIT Student, Hacker, Goth, and All-Around Badass, was extremely confused. The last thing she remembered, Cooper had whined and wheedled her into submission about attending some asinine frat party and then promptly ditched her. Her boyfriend was the only guy she knew... and, granted, Felicity could admit that her knowledge of the opposite sex was quite limited... who, upon getting drunk, had more interest in whipping it out, metaphorically-speaking, to play video games instead of to, well, play her.

But whatever. She didn't need him to have a good time. Sure, Felicity would rather spend her Saturday night without Alpha Kappa Slap-Assa, but she was adaptable. She found a not completely terrible bottle of red wine, commandeered the DJ's laptop, and was even pleasantly surprised to discover someone had brought brownies to the party. Did anything go better with wine than dessert?

Only... this didn't feel like a sugar rush, and how the hell had she gotten... wherever the hell she was? While some simpletons with limited vocabularies would refer to her as short, Felicity preferred to view herself as sized 'concentrated awesome.' Unfortunately, with a slight stature and frame came a low tolerance for baked goods. Not that it ever stopped her from indulging. Felicity had just... learned how to embrace the high. And make it her bitch, because nothing got her coding juices flowing better than a pint of mint-chip.

However, this was unlike _any_ sugar rush she'd ever experienced before. Even calculating in the wine, and the fact that, now that she was starting to think more clearly, Felicity could remember the not one but _two_ special brownie ingredients – weed and walnuts, the second of which she was highly allergic to, none of these factors explained why she'd ended up... here.

So, _this_ is what Dorothy felt like, though, at the moment, Oz would've made more sense and been more reassuring than... what? Hell island? Spinning around on the ridiculously rocky beach beneath her... okay, she really needed a pedicure, because her feet looked _horrible!_ And had they grown? And her legs were so hairy, which led Felicity to believe that maybe she'd been in some kind of anaphylactic coma, except her legs were also entirely too muscular when, if she'd been unconscious for several weeks, they should've been atrophied.

But she was getting sidetracked.

Before she could worry about anything else, she needed to figure out where she was, so then she could get as far away and back to civilization as quickly as possible. Right. So, where was she...? Oh, yes. Rocks. A beach. Gray, freezing looking water for as far as the eye could see surrounding her and the island she was, apparently, stranded upon. And birds. Lots, and lots, and lots of birds, all of which were pecking at a mound of rocks resembling some rudimentary, crude burial ground. Only, Felicity somehow knew that the mound didn't just resemble somebody's final resting place, but that it was an actual grave, and, not just anybody's grave; it was her father's.

Running frantically towards the birds, she did everything she could think of to shoo them away, while, at the same time, feeling as though she was slipping further and further into madness. She hadn't seen her father, Noah, in years. She _barely_ remembered what he looked like, and, yet, somehow, she knew that she was trying to protect his grave. But it wasn't _his_ grave. It was her father's, but it wasn't Noah's. And she was so thirsty, and so tired, and so sore, and none of this made any sense, because, while she might have had an allergic reaction, she had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time, and, while Cambridge wasn't _that_ far from the ocean, this looked nothing like the northeastern coast of the United States.

Rationally, Felicity suggested that perhaps she was still dreaming, that perhaps she was still unconscious, or maybe she had actually died – that death by chocolate (and walnuts) was an actual thing, but, at the same time, she dismissed that idea. Not only because she was Jewish, and she didn't believe in hell or even some weird, _Lost_ version of purgatory, but because everything felt too real, the sensations too present. It was like when you were a little kid and were sick with the flu – when everything was burning hot and stinging cold at the same time, and the pain was so intense, so blindingly present, that every, little second lasted that much longer. The world around you dulled, but you yourself – your feelings, your discomfort, your misery – was so powerful, you thought you'd never get better. As Felicity aged, she had learned how to compartmentalize, how to push down a stomach ache, or a sore throat, or a headache and keep functioning, but this... this complete and startling confusion brought those memories of childhood illness roaring back to the present.

The birds eventually gave up, but it was far from a surrender. Instead, they had merely retreated... as though they realized that, if patient, she'd succumb to misery, and then they'd get two meals instead of just one. And they were right. Despite wanting answers, Felicity wanted oblivion more. She wanted to go back to sleep, or back into her coma, or just... back, period. Rewind time until... what? Because, suddenly, that frat party seemed even further away, less like a memory and more like a vision, and, instead, if she thought about her recent past, she pictured a boat. And not just some little row, row, row your boat, but a 'we're going to build ships together, great big ships' boat. Only... she somehow knew that it wasn't a ship but a yacht, and she had been in a stateroom... _with a half naked, stranger yet somehow familiar woman?!_

Before Felicity could reconcile that... _whatever_ , she felt the white, hot agony of near blinding, lose your cookies and your grip on reality (not that she felt like she had any grip on _that_ in this particular moment) pain rip through her shoulder, and, like a rubber band inside of her mind, the moment snapped, she gasped, and she sat up in... a hospital bed. With the Boston skyline outside her window. And feet that were feminine with painted toenails again. And her legs weren't hairy, and they weren't muscular, and they actually felt like they were connected to her own body, including her own mind.

So, it had been a dream. No, a nightmare. The thirst, and the hunger, and the birds, and the dead father who wasn't her father but was, and the water, and the waves, and the island, and the pain, and the really confusing foray into lesbianism... but not? Felicity pinched herself, and it hurt, but it wasn't enough to convince her that she was in the right time, place, body, or even brain, so, instead, she looked around the room for something familiar, something grounding, something... electronic.

Spotting the television remote on her bedside table, she practically threw herself out of the narrow hospital bed with the scratchy sheets in her haste to touch something she recognized. In her cutting edge world, television and even cable were technology dinosaurs, but there were no laptops or cell phones in sight, and she sure as hell wasn't touching any of the scant medical equipment peppering her small, private room. With shaking fingers, Felicity switched on the wall-mounted television, instantly changing the channel several times... just for the sake of doing something. But, before she could even contemplate her next step in reorienting herself, she realized that every, single channel was playing the same story, the graphics never changing despite the various networks broadcasting them.

Words managed to penetrate her still foggy, still addled mind before anything else. _North China Sea. Yacht. Queen Consolidated. Robert Queen. Oliver Queen. Lost at sea. Presumed dead._

While everyone in the world had absolutely no reason to believe anything different than what was being told to them across, what was no doubt, all media platforms, only Felicity Megan Smoak knew the truth. It didn't make sense – how she knew. She was a scientist. Cold, hard facts were her jam. Felicity didn't entertain anything as truth unless there was empirical and documented evidence to back it up. No, it was her mother – her flighty, romantic, let's face it, a little bit ditsy mother who put her stock in such foolish things as fate and destiny. In fact, Donna Smoak was known to blow extra cash on tarot card and palm readings rather than putting that money where it belonged... which was in a savings account. And, now, here Felicity sat _actually_ contemplating the idea that, not only was such... nonsense not nonsense after all, but that she herself had, what? - some kind of _mind_ connection with a man that was supposed to be dead?

And perhaps the scariest aspect of this was that these thoughts _did not_ hurt her brain.

Her brain.

Her big, beautiful, full scholarship to MIT brain could do this. It could figure _this_ out. So, let's say that she and Oliver Queen somehow just happened to lose consciousness at the exact same time. Okay. That was possible. Not probable but possible. But then what? Their wires got crossed? Too bad humans didn't have wires. Computers had wires, and wires were wires were wires. It didn't matter how much Felicity wished that humans could be more like computers, they weren't. Instead, humans had feelings, and emotions, and, apparently, frakking psychic abilities, too.

Switching off the TV, Felicity took a deep breath... okay, so maybe she took five... and refocused on being practical. There was a logical explanation to all the crazy she woke up to. If she'd been asleep for a while, the chances were good that, at some point, one of the nurses or even Cooper had been watching TV while she slumbered on. Subconsciously, the news reports of Oliver Queen and his father had influenced her dreams, and, given her near-death experience, those dreams had been heightened. The explanation was still a little too... new-age-y for Felicity's taste, but, at least, it wasn't as insane as accepting her role as the new Madame Cleo.

Except... when she tried to focus, her senses not only sharpened in Boston, Massachusetts, but they also sharpened in what she knew, somehow without a shadow of a doubt, was an island in the North China Sea. At the same time, Felicity could smell the hospital's antiseptic as she tasted the salt in the air from the ocean. When she blinked, she was practically blinded by the morning sun streaming in through her hospital window just as she had to adjust her eyes to the dimness of what appeared to be a cave... and a man with long, shaggy black hair looking at her – no, looking at Oliver Queen – expectantly.

While Felicity could admit to herself that all of... _this_ was kind of amazing, it was also weird, and frightening, and so implausible, but the worst part was that she couldn't tell a soul. While Oliver Queen's friends and family would mourn his loss, she knew he was alive – suffering, and miserable, and hurt, and grieving, and starving, _but alive_. Yet, if she said anything, she'd be labeled insane. At best, she'd be hated for trying to manipulate a grieving mother and sister and labeled an opportunist gold-digger; at worst, she'd be committed. But she also couldn't sit around, live her life, and go on as though she didn't know. In that way, perhaps that was Oliver Queen's one stroke of luck – that, if anyone had to form this bizarro connection with him, it was her, because, while Felicity Smoak might have been just a nobody college student from Las Vegas, Nevada, her computer skills were far from nothing.

Scrambling out of her hospital bed, she rushed around the room, yanking out her IV without even a thought to the needle or the blood left behind and getting dressed. She didn't have time for her childhood fears or to wait around for the nurses or even Cooper to help her. In fact, she suddenly realized that she no longer had the time nor the patience for her boyfriend himself and Cooper's juvenile and shortsighted vendettas. Rather, she had a yacht accident to reconstruct... at least, she believed it to be an accident. But what if it wasn't?

Shaking away her thoughts, Felicity focused on the immediate tasks at hand versus getting ahead of herself. One step at a time. She'd figure out why the Queen family yacht went down, and that knowledge would hopefully help her find Oliver Queen and plant the evidence his family would need to realize he was still alive and where he could be found. Everything else? This... _connection_ she now had to the missing, billionaire playboy, this ability? Felicity would worry about that later – _after_ she put it to use and rescued the man she was just starting to realize would change her life forever. Whether that change would prove to be good or bad remained to be seen, but, either way, Felicity Smoak was ready for the challenge. Because she had to be... for both their sakes.


End file.
